The Silence

Two sisters and the young son of one of them are travelling home through a foreign European country when illness forces them to break their journey. They take rooms in a large, nearly empty hotel in a city whose inhabitants speak a language none of them understands. Ester, the elder sister, is unwell and withdrawn; Anna, restless and sensual, seeks company elsewhere, while the boy Johan is left largely to himself and wanders the corridors of the hotel. The distance between the sisters, and the failure of anyone around them to communicate, shape the days they spend waiting to continue their travels.

Ingmar Bergman wrote and directed the film, his thirteenth feature in a career that would eventually number twenty-four. It arrived in 1963, the same year as Winter Light and three years before Persona. Ingrid Thulin plays Ester and Gunnel Lindblom plays Anna, with Jörgen Lindström as Johan; Allan Ekelund produced for SF Studios. The black-and-white drama runs 95 minutes.

Audience response on IMDb and TMDB places the film well regarded decades after its release, and critics' ratings collected for it are similarly strong. Those figures reflect its standing as one of the director's major works from the early 1960s. Its treatment of two sisters unable to reach each other, set in an unfamiliar country on the edge of war, remains the film's central concern.